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Lead DevelopmentFACT · 4/5•6 Oct '26•Via techcrunch

AI wunderkind Sigil Wen launches on-device assistant Underdog

Sigil Wen, a 17-year-old self-taught coder and Thiel Fellow, has launched Underdog, an invite-only beta AI assistant that runs entirely on-device, prioritizing user privacy. Underdog is powered by Husky, Wen's own inference engine, and uses a 27-billion parameter model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B. The startup behind it, Conway Research, is backed by prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. Unlike many AI assistants that monetize user data, Underdog will never be ad-supported and will instead take a small percentage of payment transactions facilitated through Stripe's payment rails. The company aims to prove that AI capabilities don't require sacrificing privacy, making it a direct competitor to more data-hungry assistants like Instinct and Muse.

•Underdog is an invite-only beta AI assistant that runs entirely on-device, currently on Macs and Windows PCs.
•Underdog is powered by Husky, a custom inference engine built by Sigil Wen.
•The model used is a 27-billion parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B.

Entities:Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)Khosla Ventures Hummingbird Ventures SV Angel Menlo Ventures Anthropic Stripe OpenAI Perplexity Midjourney

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